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Chapter 19. Integrated Scripting Environment

Introduction

While text-mode PowerShell is great for its
efficiency and automation, there’s not much to be said for its user
interface. Most Windows key combinations don’t work. Text selection and
editing don’t work. Rectangular text selection is strange, as is the lack
of support for freely resizing the console window.

All of these are simple side effects of
PowerShell.exe being a console
application. These problems impact every console application in Windows
and likely always will.

Aside from the user interface oddities, the
fatal flaw with console applications comes from their lack of support for
the Unicode standard: the way that most international languages represent
their alphabets. While the Windows console supports a few basic
non-English characters (such as accented letters), it provides full
support for very little else.

This proves to be quite a problem for worldwide
administrators! Since typing international characters directly at the
command line was so difficult, administrators in many countries were
forced to write scripts in Notepad in order to get full Unicode support,
and then use PowerShell to run the scripts, even if the command was
ultimately only a single line.